In October 2021, I was in Alanya (a city in southern Turkey), and I was looking at an apartment for rent. Having delved into the market, I tested my experience, talked with other buyers and sellers. I saw a lot of problems with the lack of information and the frequency of realtors' work. This gave me the idea to create a real estate service that will connect buyers and sellers from different countries in the same market, and make the initial process of finding a property for purchase more qualitative and easy. I have created an MVP, which so far concerns only one market - Turkish real estate for buyers from Russia and CIS countries.
Used the Design Thinking approach for solving this problem. To practice design thinking we followed the below process.
Discovery: Desk research, competitors and best practices research, users survey User research: user interviews, jobs to be done, personas Ideation: Information architecture, user flows, generation of testing of various solutions, sketching Final design solution: Color mockups, next steps and final thoughts
I conducted a survey, studied the forums and chats in telegram. Based on the data obtained, I identified the main problems:
1. "Black realtors" on the market, sometimes buyers are getting scammed
2. The ad is too "tempting". When the buyer comes to see the object live, the photos and prices do not match
3. Buyers do not understand the market, and it is difficult for them to understand when realtors intentionally inflate prices.
COMPETITORS RESEARCH I analyzed 12 competitor services. How do existing services help solve problems? I decided on the functions that I need to include in the service and highlighted the most interesting solutions for me. There are only 2 similar services (namely competitors). The remaining 10 are websites of real estate agencies and practices of major real estate search services in the world.View the table